Juice Stand

Once again, an attempt to purchase food has inspired a strip. I went to a cotton candy stand at an outdoor festival this past weekend to purchase my lovely wife a “small” cotton candy, and was told that they only had “big” and “large.”

I’m fully aware that fast food chains have been doing dumb things for years like adding sizes beyond “large” and removing “small” so that they start with “medium.”

But…”big” and “large?” These are SYNONYMS. All attempts at differentiation have been completely abandoned. We have achieved total adjective unity. I’m sure this decision has increased cotton candy sales dramatically.

So, sorry if this strip seems like more Seinfeldian or Sunday Comics-ish than the standard fare, but I couldn’t get this out of my head.

On an unrelated note, my clip art collection has surprisingly crappy selection of “vendor” pictures, and almost all of the vendors pictured appear to be vaguely Asian for some reason.

On an even less related note, the finalists have been selected in the PartiallyClips bake sale contest and will be announced soon, at which point you will be able to vote on your favorite!

Hey, I’m with ya on this. Starbucks started this little fad, as far back as my annoyed awareness goes. I say let’s start a consumer revolt. #1, we print, laminate, and carry this strip with us at all times. When faced with this absurdity, we whip it out and scream “SMALL! I woulda ordered a LARGE if your company’s stupid terminology hadn’t pissed me off!” #2, when faced with a litany of stupid terms, especially in a drive-thru, demand to know the ounces of each before ordering. (Tell ’em you can’t read the sign.) #3, with such a regulation-happy current government, I’m sure there’s some agency schmuck who would be happy to write up and implement standard relative-size terminology. Oh, hey, then we could combine it with the health care legislation and have it apply to body parts! YES! “Eentsy” and “OMG!” would have to be quantified with standard measurements.

Galanadra – There really were two sizes. I can’t help but wonder how many times the vendor had to have this conversation throughout the course of the day. I mean, it MUST take longer to wait on people when you have to take the time to explain the codenames for the relative volumes of your product offerings rather than use the words that already exist in the English language. And incidentally, your name would make an excellent drink size.

Y’know what bugs me more than this, though? When you ask a pizza place how big their various pizza sizes are, and they respond by telling you the number of slices in each. This is an even more common phenomenon, and a friend of mine told me his geometry teacher once went into a screaming rage discussing this very subject.

Went to Wendy’s drive-thru and ordered a large chocolate Frosty. The talking box said that they only had small and medium Frostys. I asked for a medium chocolate Frosty and the talking box said that they didn’t have any chocolate available at the moment. I asked for a medium vanilla Frosty and the talking box quoted the price and directed me to drive around to the window. They handed me a large cup that was half full of vanilla Frosty. I said that I ordered a medium vanilla Frosty. She said that they had just knocked over all of the medium cups onto the floor and had to use the large cups until they could find the medium sized ones in the store room. I asked her how she could be certain that she had given me all of the medium vanilla Frosty that I had paid for, and she said “medium is half of large.”

I recall Yahtzee making mention of the madness of the medium as small. Coffee is similar but slightly more logical in the case of the Italian espresso sizes. tall was the large that was bigger than a short. grande meant really big and Vente just literally means 20 cause Italians couldn’t even conceive of serving a drink that large so they never made a word for it.

I have seen ice cream places go the other way with this: rather than eliminating “small” and going from medium to bigger-than-big, they add smaller sizes. Thus, “baby” = 1 scoop, “kiddie” = 2 scoops, “small” = 3 scoops, “medium” = 4 scoops, and “large” = 5 scoops. This has, I think, 2 primary effects:
1) When I order a small and get 3 scoops, i think “hey, I’m getting a lot for my money!”
2) When I’m on a diet I can trick myself and feel good because I’m “only” ordering a small

Even though Starbucks has the whole size renaming going on, I think the USDA started it. The grades of beef are Prime, Choice and Select. Select is basically dog-food, Choice is what you typically get in the grocery store, and Prime is snapped up by all of the premium restaurants. But you can’t tell from the names, can you?